Gender-based Insights into the Fundamental Diagram of Pedestrian Dynamics

Abstract

Over the past few years, several experimental studies have been conducted to explore the diversity in pedestrian dynamics with respect to several factors like culture and motivation. However less attention has been payed to the influence of gender on a crowd. One of the most fundamental experiments in this context aims at investigating the differences of pedestrian dynamics in narrow corridors with closed boundary conditions. The main advantage of this simplified set-up is the ease to control the density, which enables studying the so-called Fundamental Diagram (density-velocity relationship, FD) in a controlled and consistent manner. In this paper, we investigate the main characteristics of pedestrian dynamics observed in laboratory experiments conducted in Palestine, using single-file pedestrian flow information. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis among the gender-based FDs for different cultures, in an attempt to study the different characteristics and factors that may influence their dynamics and motion flows.